Marshall Fisher is quite clear about what doesn't make for great leadership. “A failure of leaders is in becoming insular and arrogant,” he says. “They cut themselves off from the people they're supposed to be leading.”

So how would he define good leadership? The Wharton School professor is equally clear about that. “It's about identifying megatrends and defining a future state in a way that gets people excited about it,” he says. Although Fisher is too down-to-earth to put it this way—as befits his Midwest roots—he has just described his own approach to teaching the next generation of business leaders, including many of tomorrow's supply chain managers.

As the UPS Professor of Operations and Information Management at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, Fisher makes it his business to spot the next megatrend—and to help his students learn to be trend-spotters too. About 12 years ago, involved in some client work with a regional retailer in eastern Pennsylvania, he came across an important shift in the retail sector. His consequent teaching work has helped open the eyes of many of his students to the intriguing information-management challenges to be found in the retail business.

The shift that Fisher noticed was that the leaders in the retail sector were starting to adopt many of the same analytical, data-driven business processes and principles that Wall Street firms had long used. The Pennsylvania retailer's experiences showed there was much more intelligence hidden in the company's data, and much of it would reveal patterns that would then help the retailer plan for and expand its sales. The Wharton professor's name for the new scientific management approach: “rocket science retailing.”

The term gained widespread currency after Fisher co-authored an article with that title with two Harvard Business School colleagues, Professor Ananth Raman and research associate Anna McClelland, in the Harvard Business Review in 2000. Its central premise is that advances in information technology can significantly improve the way that retailers forecast demand and plan supplies. The promise: When retailers apply analytic tools to their data, they will see better in-stock rates, fewer markdowns—and profit increases of at least five percentage points of revenue.

During his 35-year career, the operations research specialist has consistently placed a premium on hard data. Before joining the faculty of the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business in 1970, he was a systems engineer in IBM's Boston-area sales office. Joining the Wharton faculty in 1975, he has been tireless in getting others to see the value of strong data analytics in the service of more effective operations. He used the rocket science retailing discovery to develop a course on retailing science, with a spotlight on the fashion retail sector where demand can be especially tricky to predict.

“We have 110 students taking this course now—80 percent MBAs and 20 percent undergraduate,” he says. Part of the beauty of the course is that he is able to relate supply chain mechanics and analytics to a world that every one of his students experiences as a consumer. “Half of those students are headed to careers in finance where spreadsheets are king. But now some of them are excited about retailing,” says Fisher. It helps when he has been able to bring in top-notch practitioners such as Kevin Freeland, formerly Best Buy's senior vice president of inventory management, who calls himself a “rocket science retailer” for his extensive use of analytics in operations improvements. The students hear Freeland describe rocket science retailing in action: In the late 1990s he led an initiative that reduced inventory by about $1 billion while improving in-stock rates.

Fisher's course also helps to elevate the status of the supply chain function—connecting it to tangible supply chain decisions in a low-margin industry. It's an issue that's bigger and more intricate than any one college course can resolve, of course, which is why Fisher urges supply chain leaders to address the issue of the status of their organizations. “The biggest issue I see for practicing supply chain managers is raising the profile and prestige of the function,” he says. One way in which they can do so: Be alert to megatrends and be ready to champion effective responses to them before competitors can.

Although Fisher explains that he is not a teacher of leadership, he certainly makes his students aware of what works and why good leadership matters. In one exercise, participants interviewed store managers of the Wawa retail chain—a highly successful regional operator.

Meeting one numbers-driven manager and another, equally successful, who excels at schmoozing with customers, most students learn that there is no one true management style that constitutes best-practice leadership. Then, when they meet Wawa chief operating officer David Johnson, they learn about the importance of leadership depth – strong leadership capability up and down the organization, from the executive offices to the corner gas station and convenience store.

So how does Fisher describe his own leadership style? He thinks of it as “commando leadership”—not in any heroic sense, but in terms of inspirational leading by example. In his career before Wharton, Fisher had ample opportunity to practice and demonstrate this style. As an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he was co-captain of the lacrosse team, leader of his fraternity—and president of his class.

Fisher regularly takes his ideas —and his commando leadership—out to businesses. He has long been a consultant to many Fortune 500 companies, including Ahold, BMG, Campbell Soup, DuPont, ExxonMobil, Frito Lay, General Motors, IBM, Motorola, Nokia, and Scott Paper, among others.

He has also led by example in founding his own businesses. In 1981, Fisher co-founded Distribution Analysis, Research and Technology, Inc., a company that provided clients such as Frito Lay, ExxonMobil and Anheuser Busch with private truck fleet optimization software based on his research. He served as chairman of the board of directors of this company until its merger with Manugistics Inc. in 1990. He is also a co-founder and chairman of 4R Systems, Inc., a company that provides supply chain planning software to retailers of short lifecycle products.

A prodigious researcher and author, Fisher has seen his work win widespread recognition.

In 2005, his paper “The Lagrangian Relaxation Method for Solving Integer Programming Problems” published in Management Science in 1981, was voted by the membership of the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science as one of the 10 most influential papers published in Management Science during its 50-year history.

So what's the next megatrend on Fisher's horizon? He recently returned from a trip to China, meeting with electronics contract manufacturers and large private-label apparel makers and learning plenty in the process. One early insight that will surely find its way into a Wharton course unit: the influence of supply chain dynamics on societal issues half a world away. He cites the case of a leading US apparel maker that recently introduced defined labor standards for its faraway supplier's employees—and notes the positive consequences of those moves. “If the governments of the world had tried to institute such changes, they would never have happened,” says Fisher.

On the surface, that's a more qualitative theme than is typical for this data doyen. Fisher being Fisher, though, he'll find a way to have numbers bring it very much to life for his students.